Solar activity is at a minimum and some scientists are concerned. The “sun has gone into lockdown, which could cause freezing weather, earthquakes and famine, scientists say.”
Are we about to enter an ice age?
“Solar minimum is underway and it’s a deep one,” says astronomer Tony Phillips.
“Sunspot counts suggest it is one of the deepest of the past century. The sun’s magnetic field has become weak, allowing extra cosmic rays into the solar system.”
During the Dalton Minimum, temperatures plummeted by up to 2 degrees Celsius, that is 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, for 20 years, devastating food production around the world.
The weather in 1816 earned the year two popular nicknames: the “Year Without a Summer” and “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” Snow fell in July.
So far, the year 2020 has witnessed a sun with no sunspots 76 percent of the time, a rate surpassed only once before in the Space Age. That was last year, when sunspot activity was at 23 percent. There were no sunspots the other 77 percent of the time.
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AARON HILL’S NOTEBOOK 